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Notion is a rumored $800M ARR business, growing year over year and hitting its number. It is not a company in trouble.
And yet, it just tore up the go-to-market structure that got it there.
Notion merged its account executive and sales engineering teams into a single role, the Solutions Consultant, and it did it across every segment. One technical seller owns the customer through the sale, with no point where the deal gets handed to a separate technical resource to run the demo or do technical discovery. Suddenly, you have one person who can get into the weeds with an end user and still talk value with a CPO, something that was notoriously difficult in the old structure. Then it rebuilt the other side of the signature to match. Customer Success became Outcomes, and two new roles now carry the customer into production: a Forward Deploy Architect who designs the build and a Forward Deployed Engineer who builds it. For Notion, the predictable revenue model we all grew up on — sell, then validate, then close, then implement, then retain — needed to be collapsed.
We talked to Austen Hendler, a Solutions Consultant at Notion, who put it this way: “Our customers want to set up Notion and see impact on their business in real time. Not after meeting 3 different people. Not after a scripted demo/deck. Not on the 4th call.”
We think that Notion and others making similar moves are onto something and that this has been building for years. To be clear, we’re not saying that every organization needs to take what Notion did and apply it as a template. But Notion’s move presents an interesting data point, especially given their market context. As a company, they’re doing well, growing and hitting their numbers. They didn’t make this change out of desperation. Rather, they’re betting that the model that got them here will not carry them through what is next.
When we bring up examples like Notion with enterprise leaders, we get a lot of the same pushback: Our product is more complex, this won’t work for us.We hear you and understand the counterargument. Will a single Solutions Consultant replace the entire deal team for a massive, net-new enterprise infrastructure overhaul? No. In complex enterprise hunting, like selling cybersecurity to Fortune 100s, you still need a deep bench of specialists. If your sales rep can’t go toe-to-toe with a CTO or CIO, you’re dead in the water.
But dismissing this trend as “SMB only” misses the bigger picture. Look at the farmer motion. If you are selling into an existing, massive enterprise account, do you really need a traditional AE passing notes to an SE? Or could someone like a business-savvy SE who is aligned with management just own and expand that footprint themselves? Evaluate this from a cost of sales or cost of servicing metric. Expanding an existing customer runs about a dollar of sales and marketing per dollar of new revenue, roughly half what a net-new logo costs, and expansion now drives around 40 percent of all new ARR. Loading a full traditional deal team onto the revenue that is already cheapest to grow is the type of inefficiency a CFO is going to question.
The Predictable Revenue model, AE sells, SE validates, implementation delivers, CS retains, was built for our efficiency, not necessarily the customer’s experience. It has created a bloated cost of sale and an inefficient customer experience. Even at scale, software companies spend close to 40 percent of revenue on sales and marketing, and it now takes about two dollars of that to win a single dollar of new recurring revenue, up double digits in a year.
Recently, we heard a story about a massive enterprise software giant showing up to a pitch. The customer had 3 stakeholders in the room. The software giant brought 14 people. It was core and specialist teams alike all fighting for their share of the contract.
That isn’t just an expensive cost of sale. It’s an overwhelming, inefficient customer experience. The shift we are seeing in the market isn’t just about buyers disliking handoffs; it is about speed, trust, and unit economics. Every redundant body in a room and every delayed technical validation adds friction.
And all of this is coming as buyers are demanding more proof. The burden of proof has gone up, the technical validation buyers expect keeps getting deeper, and they want it sooner, not later. The demo had a good run, as we wrote earlier this year, but a polished walkthrough of what is possible no longer closes deals. Buyers want to see the thing work in their environment, with their data, before they sign.
And here is the part that the most innovative orgs have figured out. Better proof doesn’t have to mean more complexity or more people. The reflex is to answer harder proof with a bigger deal team, but the best orgs are doing the opposite, clearing the bar with a leaner motion rather than a heavier one. A director of forward deployed engineering told us what happens when the proof runs in the buyer’s own environment: “When they do see the workflow work in their sandbox environment, it’s like an immediate aha moment, which leads straight to ‘I’m ready to buy, here’s my credit card.’ That didn’t happen before.” One SE leader running a forty-person global team told us his best reps have stopped demoing the product at all: “The most AI-pilled folks on my team are shifting the way they demo, from actually showing our product to showing a version of the customer’s product that’s powered by our technology.” Another leader runs a deep discovery, then builds an agent that stands up the customer’s own implementation before the meeting from their real data. On that deal, two SEs, not fourteen, ran a hands-on workshop for sixteen stakeholders.
Doing both, carrying deep technical proof and making it simple for the buyer, is the Solutions skillset. It always has been. We have written before about the Modern Solutions Mandate, the argument that Solutions is not a support function but the function best positioned to own what buyers now care about most. This is what that mandate looks like in practice.
It also points to where Solutions is most valuable to the wider GTM org: as its innovation and experimentation arm. You are already the team standing up the sandboxes, building the agents, and testing whether a hands-on workshop closes faster than a traditional POC. So run those experiments on purpose. See what actually works, kill what does not, and fight for the motions that drive the revenue outcomes the org is looking for.
And we’re seeing proof of this across the network. One Solutions leader at a go-to-market operations software company is rewriting his company’s entire sales process and owning it outright. Another has taken over a specialty sales organization, a book of business that would traditionally sit under a sales leader. Leah McTiernan at Docusign frames Solutions as a revenue and growth accelerator, not a support line the commercial team calls when it gets stuck. Across the network, leaders are moving ten to fifteen percent of their SEs into quota-carrying roles. As Shannon Hogue at Vanta put it on our podcast: “Technical validation commoditizes what we do. We’re not just nerds that sit next to sales folks.”
The one thing this profession cannot afford now is to stay quiet. We already know the value our teams and our skillset hold. The leaders who win the next few years are the ones who say it out loud, to the CRO and the CFO, and back it with proof.
Based on what we are hearing from the network, nobody has this fully figured out yet. A lot of the leaders we talk to are knee deep in it right now, rethinking org design, rebuilding comp for these new roles, and working out who actually carries the number. If you are in the middle of it too, we would love to talk.
Jeff & James
P.S. Applications are still open for Off The Record Bay Area, but the room is filling fast. Apply now: solutionexec.com/offtherecord
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